Port Royale = Pirates! 2?

Games
1

Xahlt brought Port Royale ( http://www.ascaron.com/englisch/index.html ) up on the Frog City thread a while back and now I see that it’s slated for a March release. Could the spiritual successor to Pirates! be right around the corner?

I thought Patrician II was a really solid game, but I lacked the wherewithal to get very good at it. Hopefully Port Royale will be more up my alley, what with the plundering of ships taking precedence over trade. One thing that I loved about Patrician II was that the game actually kept track of all the other traders in the game as they went about building their fortunes and rising in social standing, so that the world really was “alive;” this level of detail looks to be carried over to Port Royale.

I was interested in Freelancer for the similar freeform aspects, but space sims have never been my cup of tea, so Port Royale might just hit the spot.

2

Patrician II had its good ponts, but for me, it really bogged down in the late game. The beginning was a blast, but from there, much micromanagement ensued.

I think I finally quit after sending a few exploration parties out to find Italy while in the running for Hansa Top Dog.

I’d love something that had less micromanagement and more fun, as they seem to be advertising.

3

Don’t forget Sea Dogs. It was already pretty close to being an update of Pirates!, and Sea Dogs 2 is supposedly being released on the Xbox next month (PC later this year), so we’ll see how that turns out.

4

I read a comment recently where a reviewer said that there have been a lot of spiritual successors to the MOO throne over the years but none recaptured the “magic” quite as well. That is surely debateable, and “magic” is about 3 times more subjective than "fun"even - but it sort of sums up my feelings on Pirates.

Sea Dogs had amazing battles and a lot of the same elements as Pirates, but I found the privateering aspect of takings ships and selling them easy to a fault; I didn’t care for the storyline background to your character, especially on replay; and I really didn’t like running around the less-than-charismatic NPC towns when I’d rather have been loading grapeshot on my cannons. I’m looking forward to Sea Dogs 2 but it seems they’re actually strengthening those aspects in the sequel, which I’m sure a lot of people liked, but IMO take it farther from what I liked in Pirates.

I haven’t got a good handle on how Port Royale actually plays, so I’ve got some strong hope there, but I think it may end up being more building than battling; on the plus side, I’m sure there will be a very interesting economy, but I found Patrician 2 awfully dry at times so I hope it will be quite a bit more exciting when they add in privateers and wenches. Like Jason, I really like it when games keep track of NPCs in relation to you (Patrician, Europa, Rockstar - which got brought up recently) for immersion, so it’s cool to see this carry over.

It’ll be an interesting couple of months, these two and Pirate’s Cove as well. And who knows whether we might get a real Pirates! sequel now with Firaxis producing Microprose licenses.

5

Yeah, Sea Dogs (Akella) was fun, but really more of a ship combat simulation in pirate clothes (not surprising, considering Akella made the Age of Sail games). Plus, there were crazy bugs in that one.

I wouldn’t buy Sea Dogs II without some good press.

The concept was great, and the sailing/combat was fun, but there were way too many scripting/plotline bugs.

6

For my money, I liked Hothouse’s Cutthroats even more than Pirates! Multiship battles and clumsy but effective RTS battles in fully rendered cities along with neat piratical tactics like switching flags and rumming up the men before a fight made for something that felt a heckuva lot like a Pirates II. It was, ahem, a bit more than a homage - it was a complete lift but it worked for me. They lost some details like duelling but included alot more ship management even to the point of individual officers with different names, portraits and skills. Each ship encountered had a unique name for that matter. I spent many hours with this one and I always end up reloading it from time to time.

7

I played Cutthroats a lot, and it was certainly filled with a lot of great stuff – the developers really put their hearts into it – but in the end I found the interface just too damn annoying. Transferring cargo from dock to ship was incredibly tedious, and trying to get the right officer in charge of the right ship was difficult. The fact that if your crew’s morale started dropping you could just abandon most of them in port and divvy up the loot amongst the few you kept seemed like a major loophole in the managerial challenge of being a pirate captain. The clincher, though, was that sea battles were on the one hand pretty easy to win due to poor AI and a wonky damage model, but on the other hand a pain to manage because you couldn’t give orders to your ships while the game was paused. Ah Hothouse – so many great game ideas, such flawed implementation… Pretty fun game on balance, though, I’ll give ya that.

Patrician II’s interface was really well-designed and effective, so Port Royale will hopefully have less problems than Cutthroats in that area. Although there looks to be no RTS battle aspect, it does say you can take cities by force, and I think it’s pretty cool that you’ll have the option to build plantations and workshops if you want to go that route. The real test for me, though, will be how the sea battles hold up – whether they’re easy to manage and have decent enemy AI.

8

You should check out the latest patches. While I never discovered the ‘cheating the men’ bug I probably would have avoided it. That’s the beauty of single player games - no need to cheat. I didn’t find the AI all that bad myself in naval fights. It maneuvered and fired - though some ships were clearly more aggressive and capable than others. I don’t recall the naval AI in Pirates! really amazing me either. The key was always mastering enough skills to take down better armed ships rather than capably captained ones. Admittedly, the landlubbing combat AI was pretty weak. They’d just trickle at you whenever they saw you. But, as with naval battles, the worthwhile fights always saw you outgunned and relied on your skills to overcome odds not a Sun Tzu-like AI. Who doesn’t like shelling the defenders or lighting off barrels of gunpower to blow a hole in a wall or burning houses to lure garrisons away from their posts…?

Admittedly, Cutthroats has more than its share of issues but it managed to pull off immersion and entertainment enough for me. Patrician II, OTOH, while very attractive and interesting was just too much of a spreadsheet program to hold me for very long. I do plan to try it again though as it seemed to have some potential. I wouldn’t exactly rave about the naval combat there either.

9

I played with the latest patches. They were necessary to make the game playable at all. And I know there’s no need to cheat in a single player game, but the existence of loopholes like that kind of kill my suspension of disbelief. Weird, but I’m stuck with it.

The land battles were indeed a great aspect of Cutthroats. I enjoyed them despite the bugs. You’re right that the sea battle AI may not have been any worse than that of Pirates!, so I guess I’m hoping for something better than mediocre in Port Royale. The thing that really bugged me about sea battles in Cutthroats was the extraordinarily high chance that a given ship would blow up due to a “lucky shot” – I like the inclusion of the possibility, but it happened way too often for it to be enjoyable. Or maybe I’m just really unlucky!

I agree about the spreadsheet aspect of Patrician II; it’s part of what kept me from getting too deep into it. I hope Port Royale will reduce that aspect of the gameplay.

10

I never really got into Patrician II, but was heavily addicted to the first one. Port Royale is quite decent, btw. Ascaron is currently also working on a game which is a straight remake of Pirates, but since it’s a budget project it’s unlikely to show up outside Germany.

11

There’s is a demo out now for this. Avault among others (downloading now). Anyone tried it yet?

12

I have had Port Royale since it was released in the UK a month ago. It is a great game, although it is very difficult in the beginning.

It follows the Pirates! model fairly closely although there’s no swordfighting, and no RTS land battles (uses a popup panel like Galciv). There is a fun, Pirates!-esque sea battle portion, which is pretty nice looking to boot, with pixelshaded reflections on the water if you have a compliant gfx card.

The main portion of the game, the Caribbean map, works very similarly to Pirates! but with far more of everything - more Governor missions, more “Personal” missions (collect bits of treasure map, find lost sister/mother etc). There are trading missions, “help populate this town” missions, “help destabilise this town” missions, Seek and Destroy Pirate Foo missions.

One of my favourite features is that you can meet shipless Pirate captains in the Inns, hire them, give them a ship and they will go off and raid by themselves, giving you a portion of their loot as their sponsor.

The only potential downside is that PR is hard at the beginning - you have to struggle to build up a steady flow of income via trade routes before you are able to comfortably go off exploring with your main fleet. Your expenses are constantly being deducted from your cash balance, so income is very, very important. The game has a cool trade route sequencer applet built in that after 10 mins fiddling around becomes second nature. I’ve had a lot of fun figuring out good trade routes and programming them in, and watching them accrue money, or lose it if I screw up.

If you were a Pirates! obsessive, this is definitely the game for you.

13

Yeah, I just tried the demo, and I’m sold. While the interface still has some confusing bits, it’s an improvement over Patrician II.

The presentation is fairly dry, but, like Romance of the Three Kingdoms, the variables are such that your imagination can fill in the narrative details. I love the fact that all of the AI traders and pirates are truly dynamic, which really heightens the feeling of competition.

Sam, can you tell me what the deal is with the little animated indicators of a sunken ship? You know, the little floating debris and guy waving a little flag? Can you actually salvage stuff from those spots if you get there in time, or are they just indicators that a battle occurred?

14

Unfortunately, no I can’t! They always disappear before I get to them, and I’ve tried quite a few times. Perhaps that’s my bad luck, or perhaps they’re just a bit of artistic license, and not supposed to be functional in any way. They’re not mentioned in any of the documentation, so I tend to just ignore them now.

15

I think they are part of quests you can get in port; sometimes there will be one to look for a ship lost off the coast of “fill in the blank”, but they don’t do anything if you don’t have the quest.

I was excited enough to get the import – but I definitely can’t give it full Pirates! marks. I think the game is somewhat unfortunately distinctly split between pirating and trading; you can do both, but you really have to micromanage each aspect to make a real profit, at least until the latter stages. I also think it has quite a bit of Patrician’s dryness.

I’m not personally as interested in trading (which has the same dynamic economy elements as the Patricians) so much as pirating, so part of it is probably that half the game feels like sterile work for me, which I doubt is the case for any trading gurus. But I had a lot of issues with the ship battling sequences too : there don’t seem to be any real point-of-sail differences between fore and aft rigged vs square rigged,; ship speed seems just a function of maximum speed moderated by ship damage (does wind speed even exist?); grapeshot is inordinately effective, even at a stand-offish range, making boarding without significant casualties easier than fighting broadside (and more profit in returning undamaged too); ships are so easy to acquire that the cost of running a crew is ridiculously inflated to the point where you must always be getting treasure just to pay the crew (meaning you can’t afford to do many “kill this admiral” type missions before losing half your money); and there’s no way to chase a ship off the battle screen - once it goes past the square edge, you can’t catch it, even if you were overtaking it - which is a horrible exploit for avoiding more powerful fleets by just running to the edge. All of which is not to mention the 10 galleon military escort that automatically appears and hones in on your position when you capture too many of a nation’s ships. For a game with a dynamic economy, it sure doesn’t have an accurate model for determining where all these military frigates came from.

Despite that list, I did enjoy the game, for a while at least, but IMO, it felt too much like Ascaron had the Patrician parts down pat and their stab at the additional combat/quests/etc didn’t come off nearly so well.

16

I can’t find the training fleet in the Demo tutorial.There is no highlited area on the Sea Chart after I get the Map nor any Providence. Found Cartanaga but it is not near there… Help :cry:

17

It’s waiting for you near the thinnest part of Central America, iirc. Look at the map again in your log and compare it to the actual game map. When you sail close enough, you’ll spot the fleet.

18

In France, they call it Port Royale with Cheese.

19

Just dredging this thread up to say that I got my Port Royale with cheese in the mail today along with Ghost Master, and after around six hours I’m liking it.

There’s a heck of a lot to do: governor missions, special NPC tasks, trading, infrastructure building, treasure hunting, freebooting, etc. You can go pirate hunting too, and I’ve seen a few historical figures pop up on the wanted list. I started my first game as a straight trader to get the hang of it, then started another to try the life of a pirate. So far I’ve been successful at it, remaining friendly to my home country (France) and lurking in trading lanes to prey on the Dutch. Nothing like hitting the cargo jackpot, or managing to capture a bigger ship and sell it off at the nearest friendly governor’s town. I got reckless and attacked English and Spanish ships as well, but managed to salvage my reputation with them by lying low long enough for it to improve.

The economic system is really great. Every port has different goods which it specializes in, and if you want you can construct buildings to take advantage of that. In my merchant game I built a sugar cane plantation and a sawmill to provide the resources for a rum distillery, the products of which I would then take on a “rum run” through the Bahamas. Over time, settlements actually grow according to how much trade and industry they attract, and it’s hard to tell for sure, but the economy really does seem to be dynamic. After tooling around some dinky settlements for a long while in my first game, it was fun to pull into Port au Prince and see what a thriving town it was, with many luxury goods available in abundance.

The combat is pretty good, I think the best so far of games in this particular genre; simpler but more managebale than Cutthroats. I haven’t found anything predictable yet about the behavior of enemy ships, and I was pleased to discover that they hightail it for the edge of the tactical map when the odds are overhwhelmingly against them. I agree with xahlt’s comment about the grapeshot being too efficient at clearing an enemy’s deck. But at least I find myself using each of three different kinds of shot depending on the situation.

A nice aspect of the graphics is that the ships are 3D models that vary greatly in size, so that a galleon really does appear to dwarf a brig. And although the music is of high quality, the one thing I’ve found myself wishing is to be able to substitute in the terrific Tropico 2 soundtrack.

All in all, at this point I give it a thumbs up. Despite repeated attempts, I couldn’t really get into Patrician II, but Port Royale has managed to hook me.

20

Hmm, Cutthroats and Port Royale are on my list now. I like finding out about games I hardly heard of. Thanks people!

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